Project Description

This Teacher Made A Video About His Star Student Trying To Get Into College. She’s Not Getting In.

Clint Smith tells us that “Everything I write, even when it’s not directly about me, is informed by my students.

“Memoir” wasn’t something I thought about until I had a student that said, “It doesn’t matter if I have a 4.0 and 2400 on my SATs. I don’t have a social security number so I can’t go to school.”

My poetry is me trying to reconcile my own life and opportunities I’ve had with opportunities my students aren’t given and how profoundly unfair that is…

The goal of my work is to humanize the research and the data. Often we get so caught up in the statistics and the data and the budgets and things that are more meta and quantitative there’s no space. We lose the sense of why we’re engaged in the work to begin with.” Consider the plight of our children, those brought to the States without papers. Clint Smith has. He has seen the data and heard the stories. Through “Memoir” he shares a student’s sorrow.

Clint Smith

His Star Student Wants To Go To College.

Every year, my students read Night by Elie Wiesel.
Following completion of the novel,
I assign them the tasks of writing their own memoir.
Maria came to America when she was five years old.
Wrote that she had to cross a river
before she ever knew what it meant to swim.
Ran through knee-high grass
as if the field were made of landmines.
Hid under the belly of trucks—
amid concrete and fertilizer
so as not to leave a scent for the dogs.
She did not know why she was running,
but she knew that her mother cried
every night for her father.
She knew she was beginning to forget
the outline of her daddy’s face.
She knew that he worked 18 hours a day
Just to provide them with the food they could barely
find at home.
She knew that he loved them
and wanted to remember what it felt
like to hold his daughter is his arms.
But Maria was five.
She doesn’t remember life in Mexico.
She remembers Kindergarten,
and sleepovers,
and middle school graduations.
She is more American, than any slice of apple pie
but that is not what we tell her.
We punish Maria for just following directions,
for being a child, who was simply listening to her parents.
We tell her parents that they are wrong for wanting a better life for their family.
We tell her that a 4.0 isn’t good enough.
We tell Maria that college wasn’t meant for girls like her.
We say too much brown skin.
We say too much accent.
We say where’d you come from.
We say you don’t have a number, so you don’t exist.
We have embedded apathy onto the eyelids of this country
and now we can’t even see what’s right in front of us.
It’s hard to convince someone to do well in school
when the law tells them that it won’t matter—
when you’re a number before you’re a face.
How convenient, that we forget our own history.
A country of immigrants
who were once told
we didn’t belong.
An assemblage of faces
simply waiting for our country to see us.

There may be small errors in this transcript.

Clint Smith

Clint Smith teaches English at Parkdale High School in Prince George’s County, MD. In 2013, Mr. Smith was named the Christine D. Sarbanes Teacher of the Year by the Maryland Humanities Council. He is profiled in the book, “American Teacher: Heroes in the Classroom” (Welcome Books, 2013) as one of the top 50 educators in the nation. In addition to teaching, Mr. Smith is an Individual World Poetry Slam finalist and is a member of Washington DC’s National Slam Poetry team. He is originally from New Orleans, LA, is an alumnus of Davidson College, and will be commencing work on his Ph.D. in Education at Harvard University this fall.